[Coco] Turbo DriveWire

[Roger Taylor]

At 03:48 PM 4/30/2011, you wrote:
>A few days back I asked for help with the DriveWire project, and boy
>did I get some :)
>
>In addition to suggestions, advice and offers of future assistance
>from several coconuts, Darren Atkinson has tweaked the bitbanger I/O
>routines to work at a blazing 230Kbps.  If I understand it correctly,
>this will also allow 115k operation on CoCo 2s, up from 57.6k.   I've
>been testing it this weekend and it's a substantial improvement in
>performance, in fact in the "Donkey Load" test being discussed over on
>Brian's forum, it beats all other systems tested by a good measure.
>
>I want to publicly thank Darren not only for this contribution but
>also for doing so much for so many projects in the CoCo realm, often
>behind the scenes.  The MCX128 expander for the MC-10 is very cool,
>and I can't wait to see the upcoming drive emulator.   Awesome stuff
>all around.
>
>-Aaron


A little humor is in order to set the tone before I mention similar 
news.  Back in 2000, my wife at the time learned that I was on my way 
to file for divorce.  My job was working me long days and I'd come 
home and pass out tired, so it was hard finding time to go see a 
lawyer.  My wife jumped me by a few days when her mother told her 
that she would win the divorce if she filed first.  To make a long 
story short, because we had/have kids and she filed first, she 
demonstrated first that she was unwilling to make the marriage work 
in the kid's best interest.  ANYWAY... jibberish chin wag chew blab 
blab 11 years down the road we are friends but I have custody of the kids.

This 230400 bps stuff just reminded me of that for some reason.  I 
spoke of CoCoNet 2.0 having 230400 bps bitbanger support a few days 
ago to a friend but I wanted to keep it silent to the masses to 
introduce the next time I was gang busted by the "other guys", sort 
of a debate-stopper if you will.  We've seen all the numbers talk on 
the forums and although I'm not a posting member I did notice my name 
mentioned quite a bit.  It's just nice to know we are all very active 
and trying to improve on our stuff even though all of the products 
are apples and oranges and can't be compared in a fair way.

Of course, I, too, owe credit to Darren Atkinson for our talks about 
230400 bps bitbanger speed 2 years ago and I tested some code back 
then as well.  I've been so terribly busy that several years have 
gone by without it being added to CoCoNet.  Now the very few days I 
was focusing on it in hopes to surprise the masses :)  it may very 
well now appear that when I do present this in CoCoNet that I would 
have been the guy who copied the idea from the DW team.

I wanted to say early on that this is not the case and that we both 
owe full credit to Darren Atkinson for sharing the idea and/or code 
with both of us.

An early Cheers to getting this to work flawlessly eventually.


-- 
~ Roger Taylor